Obsidian & Plugin REPL cookbook

Note: I am the author of Plugin REPL; I am not affiliated with Obsidian

See all cookbook pages.

This is a cookbook for Obsidian (and Plugin REPL and Obsidian’s many plugins). Documentation tends to be succinct and organized by particular features whereas cookbooks are organized more in terms of tasks that you might want to do, demonstrating what features you can use for a task.

Obsidian is a markdown editor for maintaining a personal knowledge system with very good support. There are often plugins to customize Obsidian to work how you want and do particular tasks. Plugin REPL is an Obsidian plugin (inspired by Emacs lisp) that allows you to rapidly add hacky functionality to get a task done if you know just a little programming. If there is not plugin that does this task, or you want a little more control Plugin REPL may be a good choice.

There’s a lot of “theory” around the use of Obsidian and note taking in general. This cookbook is meant to be more specific and practical. It can be quite fun to nerd out on the theory of Obsidian; it’s heady stuff.

General Obsidian resources

• The Official Obsidian Documentation

• The Obsidian Forum

• The Obsidian Reddit Community

Core Obsidian features

• Commands and hotkeys

• Creating a hotkey to jump to hotkey settings

• Useful keybindings you might want to add to Obsidian

• Quickly displaying an Obsidian window from anywhere on your Computer

• Scripting Obsidian

  • Defining Custom Commands in Obsidian

Efficiency in Obsidian

• Jumping to Obsidian from your anywhere on your desktop

• Creating new text snippets as you go with Plugin REPL

• Creating a new note from selected text

• Adding a hotkey to open common notes

• Jumping straight to community plugins search with a hotkey

• Inserting links to to your history

Structuring your notes

• Automated maps of content

• Why and how you should make your automated maps of content handcrafted over time

• Inserting links to previously visited notes

• Converting inline properties to frontmatter properties with a hotkey

Process in Obsidian

While Obsidian can be used as a “second brain”. It is also useful for getting things done.

• Progress updates for a project with a button

Plugin REPL

• Plugin REPL

• Executing plugin REPL scripts from within Obsidian

• Running Plugin REPL scripts on startup

• Using JavaScript Libraries in Obsidian with Plugin REPL

• Adding completion to Plugin REPL

Applications

• Drawing a timeline of tweets in Obsidian

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I am not affiliated with Obsidian. I am the author Plugin Repl